EVENTS

Problem-solving

If girls of 16 are being raped, then the thing to do is, lower the age of marriage so that they can be raped by their husbands instead of by anybody who happens along.

For a full ten days after she was abducted and raped by a group of men, the teenager told no-one, terrified by the men’s threats and their claim that they would distribute photographs they had taken during the attack.

When she did eventually tell her mother, things got even worse; her father, a gardener, unable to bear the trauma of what had happened to his daughter and the indignity of such photographs being passed around, swallowed pesticide.

In the following days, police arrested and charged seven men, all members of a higher caste. But the response to what took place by certain elements of society – a suggestion that the age of marriage should be be lowered to reduce rapes, and that such attacks were triggered by eating ‘Western’ fast-food – sparked both a wave of anger and a debate about India’s attitudes towards women that has gripped the country .

Oh well, it’s not so bad. Marry young and don’t eat fast food – surely a girl shouldn’t aspire to anything more than that.